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Mike Kai Chen

SAN FRANCISCO — This is a boom-and-bust city, born in a gold rush and broken in an earthquake.

San Francisco has weathered so many cycles of ruin and revival that civic leaders put a phoenix on its flag. And there are some who believe the city is in ashes once again, badly in need of another resurrection. They’re looking to the mayor’s race for salvation.

If that sounds a bit dramatic, well, welcome to politics in San Francisco, the <a href="https://allpoetry.com/The-Cool,-Grey-City-of-Love--San-Francisco" target=_blank>cool gray city of love</a> where tempers are running very hot.

Governance has long been a blood sport here — <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Chiu-a-moderate-in-SF-but-a-radical-in-Sacramento-8348850.php" target=_blank>often described</a> by local officials and city insiders as a “knife fight in a telephone booth” — but election season this year is especially fierce.

It’s the first mayoral contest since the pandemic washed over San Francisco like another natural disaster. And it’s the <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/article/sf-mayor-daniel-lurie-19863266.php" target=_blank>most expensive</a> race in city history, driven by one candidate’s deep pockets and the business tycoons and tech magnates who have spent millions to reshape the local political landscape and strengthen their power.

London Breed, chief executive since 2018, has presided over the city during a period of increased homelessness, public drug use and a downtown business exodus that has formed the backdrop of the race. Breed and her top challengers are all Democrats, but in the bright-blue world of San Francisco politics, she has long been considered part of the city’s moderate establishment.

Eric Risberg

Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist and former interim mayor who has framed himself as the race’s most conservative voice, is running to her right on a law-and-order platform. Aaron Peskin, one of the city’s most experienced lawmakers, is running to her left as the race’s only competitive representative from San Francisco’s most liberal bloc.

And Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit founder and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune whose family augers to the city’s earliest days, is running as an outsider — seeking to convince voters he can help restore its former glory.

A ranked-choice voting system makes predictions especially difficult, but no matter who prevails, a divided public here seems to agree: The fate of a great American city hangs in the balance.

“When I moved here, San Francisco was the place to be,” Josh Ouseph, a 32-year-old who relocated from Texas after college, said at a recent neighborhood block party. “And now we’ve lost that status.”

Certainly, San Francisco remains one of the country’s iconic cities, with stunning natural beauty, a vibrant arts scene, world-class restaurants and picturesque neighborhood architecture. Every resident lives within a 10-minute walk of a public park. Yet its challenges are as obvious as its charms.

It’s one of the least affordable and most unequal places in the United States. Hundreds die from drug overdoses each year, mostly after taking fentanyl, and thousands are unhoused, sleeping outside in tents or curling up on the street. Violent crime is lower here than in other big cities, but theft, public drug dealing and other crimes have left many feeling unsafe.

“We can’t stand by and let people sell drugs that are killing people on our streets,” Lurie said in an interview. “It’s out of control. We lost control of our streets.”

The problems plaguing San Francisco have made it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/13/trump-vance-california-stereotypes-insults/" target=_blank>an appealing target</a> on the right, and Farrell cast the race as an opportunity to quell conservative criticisms of the city and its leaders.

Jeff Chiu

“We have to be honest about where we sit,” said Farrell, who has held Breed responsible for the “steepest decline” in city history. “One of the opportunities that exists in this mayor’s race is to stop having San Francisco be the punching bag of the Republican Party on a national level and actually demonstrate how a competent Democrat can run a large city in our country.”

Most candidates have emphasized tough-on-crime policies: Lurie would use <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-mayors-race-2024-election-breed-lurie-drugs-18624187.php" target="_blank">ankle monitors</a> to deter arrested drug dealers, Farrell would deploy armed <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/28/farrell-calls-for-armed-national-guard-troops-in-san-francisco-to-fight-fentanyl/" target="_blank">National Guard</a> troops to curb open-air drug markets, and Breed has already secured <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/03/07/san-francisco-welfare-drug-screening-police/" target="_blank">the passage of measures</a> requiring drug screening for welfare recipients and giving police more surveillance power and less oversight.

Such proposals are a response to voters like Kelly Niland, a longtime resident who said the city has become too tolerant of petty criminal behavior.

“I am a voter who wants some change,” said Niland, who has lived in the city’s Mission District for 31 years. “I’m pretty lefty, but I’m hoping to come in to the center this year more than I ever have because I really think that liberal guilt is killing this city.”

Breed was widely popular during the pandemic, praised by those across the political spectrum here for her leadership through the crisis. But she has strained to gain the same reverence for her work on San Francisco’s other maladies.

“There is definitely voter dissatisfaction with the status quo,” said David Ho, a San Francisco political consultant and organizer in Chinatown.

Breed’s support among Asian Americans — who make up nearly 40 percent of the city’s population — has especially <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/asian-voters-breed-election-mayor-18680045.php" target=_blank>suffered</a>, Ho added, and some voters “would rather give some guy a shot than go with the status quo.”

Breed, whose campaign did not make her available for an interview, has insisted that her response is beginning to have an impact.

“We have to do more work, above and beyond, but we are starting to see improvement, and I’m really excited about what that means for the future,” Breed said in a recent <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2024/10/02/london-breed-interview-abc7-standard-kara-swisher/?itm_source=parsely-api" target=_blank>candidate forum</a>.

In the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s most troubled neighborhood, the city is indeed making progress, said Del Seymour, who has lived and advocated for social services there for more than 30 years.

“We’ve been very stagnant in our management of homelessness for way too long and for way too many administrations,” said Seymour, who isn’t publicly endorsing a mayoral candidate. But Breed’s policies meant to coerce people into accepting shelter and help have begun showing results, he said.

“Our streets have changed dramatically in just the last few months, in a good way,” Seymour said.

Breed has also cited data showing a decline in car break-ins and said the city’s district attorney has become more aggressive about prosecuting crimes. Still, her opponents say the city needs a new leader.

“Our reputation has taken such a huge hit,” Lurie told a room full of voters at a meet-and-greet near the famous Haight-Ashbury intersection. “Imagine waking up on Nov. 6 and telling the world, ‘Oh, we’re sticking with the same person who has been mayor for the last six years.’”

When critics conjure a dystopian image of dysfunctional San Francisco, they almost always point to the downtown core. This part of the city has long struggled, but in recent years it has been hit by intertwined crises: Tech workers and the retailers that subsisted on them disappeared during the pandemic, and a drug epidemic blossomed in their place.

San Francisco has been mired in the slowest pandemic recovery of any major metro area in the country, with more than a third of offices empty, according to real estate firm JLL. Nordstrom <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/after-nordstrom-closures-s-f-stop-retail-exodus-18074794.php" target=_blank>shuttered</a> its sprawling flagship store and Meta <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/Meta-lists-massive-435-000-square-foot-S-F-17729198.php" target=_blank>abandoned</a> nearly half a million square feet of office space, just two of the high-profile shocks to downtown.

The departures have exacted a psychic toll, but they also have major financial implications: Business taxes generated downtown account for a large chunk of the city’s revenue. Lost income from the area was largely responsible for a nearly $800 million hole in San Francisco’s budget earlier this year.

“Downtown is the economic and social engine of the city,” said Wade Rose, president of the business advocacy group Advance SF. “And if it’s not well, the city is not well.”

In the candidate forum, Breed said that downtown “is not going to be what it was before the pandemic.” But, she said, it could be “something better, a 24/7 neighborhood, with housing and office space, with retail and nightlife and fun.”

Her opponents largely agree with this vision, but they say Breed hasn’t moved quickly enough. Lurie promised to create a new police district for the city’s hospitality zone, where the recent <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/49ers-pearsall-shot-union-square-19735774.php" target=_blank>shooting</a> of a San Francisco 49ers player seemed to reaffirm the worst caricatures of the area. Farrell, who has said the core is “a shell of its former self,” proposed a tax incentive for companies that mandate that their employees spend at least four days a week working from the office, a policy meant to push people back to the area.

Meanwhile, Peskin, whom detractors sometimes tag as anti-big-business, worked with Breed and his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to craft a ballot measure that would lower taxes on small businesses and some large companies. Tech giants like Airbnb and Google have spent hundreds of thousands to support it.

“I’m practical enough to know that, at the end of the day, you’ve got to do business with everybody,” Peskin said.

The business and tech industry’s desires, meanwhile, have been further reflected in millions poured into the mayoral contest, according to campaign finance records. Executives and venture capitalists have largely split their dollars among the three leading moderates — Breed, Lurie and Farrell — and have channeled a portion of their spending on candidates and other races through a “<a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/secret-spending-states" target="_blank">gray money</a>” network of political action committees, which are not subject to contribution limits.

Mayoral candidates have raked in more than $30 million so far, and ballot measures with which they’ve closely aligned themselves have taken in millions more. Lurie has largely bankrolled his own campaign, spending more than $8 million and getting a $1 million contribution from his mother. Millions more have come to candidates from big-time Democratic and Republican donors.

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent about $1.5 million to elect Breed, while tech billionaire Chris Larsen has kicked in an additional $850,000. And longtime Republican donors William Oberndorf and Thomas Coates have together spent nearly $1.5 million on Farrell’s bid.

All are seeking to minimize the influence of the left and continue to push the city rightward, where its local politics have lately drifted.

In 2022, voters <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/02/16/san-francisco-school-board-recall/" target=_blank>ousted</a> three members of the school board who were seen as too focused on renaming buildings whose namesakes had alleged and sometimes tenuous ties to oppression — instead of pushing to reopen schools closed during the pandemic. Then residents <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/06/cehsa-boudin-recall/" target=_blank>recalled</a> a “progressive prosecutor” who was accused of being too lax.

Eric Jaye, a Democratic political consultant who has worked for or against every San Francisco mayor since the 1980s, said the shift is proof that the tech industry has capitalized on residents’ anxiety to push a more conservative agenda.

“This is a tech takeover,” Jaye said. “These are people accumulating massive power in our society, and they’re flexing that power in this one city to seize control of it.”

These dynamics have made the race a little lonely for Peskin, who calls himself the only serious candidate “who is independent of the billionaire forces.” He was lagging behind Breed and Lurie in the San Francisco Chronicle’s <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/sf-mayor-poll-result-19827236.php" target=_blank>most recent poll</a>.

“My vision certainly has a place for tech,” he said, “but it doesn’t have a place for tech overlords.”

Peskin has sought to distance himself from unpopular far-left policies, instead emphasizing his support for rent control and a fully staffed police department. And most of all, he has tried to promote a positive picture of the city.

But what ails San Francisco, he acknowledged, runs deep.

“The city,” Peskin said, “is not sure that it loves itself as much as it used to.”

University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism

Miami University, BA in Journalism and Interdisciplinary Studies

Reis Thebault reports on the American West Coast from Los Angeles for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2018 and has covered national breaking news, European politics and D.C. city hall. He previously worked on the local desks of the Boston Globe and the Columbus Dispatch.

Reis Thebault

Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting, 2023 

Livingston Award finalist, 2023

Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for outstanding watchdog journalism, 2022

Scripps Howard finalist for excellence in multimedia journalism, 2023

Boston University, BA in journalism

Trisha Thadani joined The Washington Post in 2023 from the San Francisco Chronicle. She covers the technology industry.

Trisha Thadani

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Lurie, Breed and Farrell fight over San Francisco’s fate in bid for mayor

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